Posts: 5

Topic: Updates and validations

Great site!

I work for a software company that can download corporate card transactions into user's profiles. We would like to do the same thing for personal credit/debit cards. This site looks like one of the best (and only) places for accumulating OFX server data. I have 2 questions for now please:1. Your validation appears to be daily. I'm assuming you are doing this with programming automation?2. If a FI changes their server url, how do you alert your users to the change?

Re: Updates and validations

Yes it is done programatically. There is unfortunately no way to automatically get changed data from banks. A user would have to find the new site info and supply updated info. Thankfully server information does not change rapidly.

Once the new data is entered in it will be available through the web service.

Re: Updates and validations

I'd like to first reiterate the statement about this site being one of the best OFX sites around...

I am in a similar situation as bltallen where I work for a software company (as a business analyst). Today we have an application where the clients report their investments (stocks, mutual funds, etc) manually or through an "semi-automated" brokerage import process where the brokerage firm posts a flat file with position data (to our FTP site) for users with an account from that brokerage firm and is enrolled in the automated import. When then process the file to automate the entry of their investments into our application. At the request of our client we are looking into setting up an OFX connection to directly request the information rather than require the brokerage firm to post files, thus eliminating some of manually processing effort and the need to maintain separate data mappings for each brokerage. I have a couple questions.

1. Is there a way to request test data from a test server for a given financial institution? I am trying to create a data mapping for how we would store the response data and I am most interested in the SECLIST aggregate. I've read the OFX spec but would need to see actual data to really define the logic that would need to be used to integrate the OFX data into our database. I can't imagine that software developers would need real account credentials in order to determine the requirements for integrating the data and testing the results.

2. Is there any information available as to the availability of the FI web servers? To put another way, is there information available about how much planned/unplanned down time is expected for each FI's web server? Are there certain days/hours that they bring the server down to perform routine maintenance activities?

Re: Updates and validations

I am guessing that since Microsoft is stopping Money, you might see a decline in activity in the OFX space. I may be wrong, but right now Quicken is the only game in town who many banks work with. Unless an organization writes it's own code, how can you trust that someone is not writing a trogan tool which steals account information. So while you can write your own code to manage your accounts at a bank, how can you trust that using someone else's program is safe?

Also notice that Quicken is trying to migrate to the Cloud space. People/Companies want to get you onto their websites.

Re: Updates and validations

donavank wrote:

I'd like to first reiterate the statement about this site being one of the best OFX sites around...

I am in a similar situation as bltallen where I work for a software company (as a business analyst). Today we have an application where the clients report their investments (stocks, mutual funds, etc) manually or through an "semi-automated" brokerage import process where the brokerage firm posts a flat file with position data (to our FTP site) for users with an account from that brokerage firm and is enrolled in the automated import. When then process the file to automate the entry of their investments into our application. At the request of our client we are looking into setting up an OFX connection to directly request the information rather than require the brokerage firm to post files, thus eliminating some of manually processing effort and the need to maintain separate data mappings for each brokerage. I have a couple questions.

1. Is there a way to request test data from a test server for a given financial institution? I am trying to create a data mapping for how we would store the response data and I am most interested in the SECLIST aggregate. I've read the OFX spec but would need to see actual data to really define the logic that would need to be used to integrate the OFX data into our database. I can't imagine that software developers would need real account credentials in order to determine the requirements for integrating the data and testing the results.

Every institution is different, uses different OFX servers and has different gotchas you have to check for. There isn't any automated way to get test data that I know of. Most FIs are not very knowledgeable about OFX.

I pasted a sample OFX file at the end of this message. You are probably interested in the POSSTOCK and BAL sections, too.

donavank wrote:

2. Is there any information available as to the availability of the FI web servers? To put another way, is there information available about how much planned/unplanned down time is expected for each FI's web server? Are there certain days/hours that they bring the server down to perform routine maintenance activities?

Thanks!donavan

It depends on the institution. In my own experience I have seen servers go down for a few hours at a time then come back up later. The downtime may be advertised somewhere. Who knows.